


The Elder

by kingedward1616



Category: Toad Worship
Genre: Gen, Politics, Worship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29194797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingedward1616/pseuds/kingedward1616
Summary: The extraordinary and legendary life of Him.





	The Elder

**Author's Note:**

> [Based on real events]

August 17th, 1926, in the idyllic village of Yangzhou, the welcomed its new birth—A male infant, born by the local Jiang family. The boy, with inborn uniqueness and talent, soon became well-known for his versatility and intelligence, and most importantly, his amiability. Albeit young, he was as mature as an elder, and probably because of his relentless and tireless studying and reading, he was accompanied by a pair of black-rimmed glasses when he was still in the age of youth and naivety.  
The age of chaos and conflict, but also the age of sparkling and inspiration. With the home to more than four hundred million people invaded by the Imperialists, the time was calling for everyman, everywhere to stand up for the nation. Jiang felt the duty calling, immaturity and danger were not to thwart him, braveness and wiseness were there to guide his journey. It was during that traumatic battle that Yangzhou was captured, and many fell, to the massacre of the slayers or to the olive branch of the invaders, but Jiang was among neither of them.  
Radical Leftists title religion as the “opiums of the people”, while to Jiang back then, the opiums to the people were, horrendously, literal opium. The Eastern invaders decided to follow in the footsteps of their Western “pioneers”, who aimed to broke down the will and power of the nation by corrupting their people. That is, the plantation of opium. The play performed one century ago, was now being played again on this frail land whose people have witnessed decades of incessant and seemingly relentless atrocities and embarrassment.  
The gate of fate opened when the monster’s claws reached Yangzhou. It was then he became a symbol of the Herculean resistance, eradicating any hope of the invaders to plant the seed of corruption into people’s hearts. It was also the time when he lost his dearest father, the man who led him onto the path of being a true man of presence, courage and toughness. Poignance and long decadent were unaffordable by the man, the sailboat cannot return though without warmth and light.  
Finally the chaotic days were gone, and the sun rose again on the land of greatness and struggle. The dangerous, yet heroic days also wrote their full-stop in Jiang’s life. Graduating from the top-notch university in the nation, Jiang decided to embrace the rudimentary effort in the infrastructure of the new-born People’s Republic. He departed from his home of water and georgic to the freezing tundra in the north. There, without any glory that could match with his leading the people, he handles the state’s vehicle-manufacture industry, utilising well his abundance of machinery knowledge acquired during his youth.  
What was also started was his studying of languages. The Slavs in the north, the Japanese and the Goryeo people in the East, and surely the English that ubiquitous. Miraculously was he able to handle the art of eloquence.  
Time elapses, as the water flows on the river in the north. Yet, Jiang’s journey has been dimmer than ever just as the solitary and melancholy of the nights of the northern land. Jiang was popular, yet unnoticed. The journey to the foreign lands and to the frontier of his home nation was not able to whisper the name of him to the ears of the supremes, as it has always been throughout history.  
He was no longer that talent of the generation, and symbol for hope and vibrance—He was getting old, and quickly. He was back to his hometown of georgic and water, but the catamaran swiftly drifting along the river was no symbol for relaxation and ease. Jiang, sitting on his armchair, holding a cup of tea while stroking across the wrinkles that started to appear on his head, and staring into the street where that young man before used to run across with infinite faith and motivation, and thousands of people following him, the river of eld emerged in front of him. In its wideness and rapidness he saw fate and history, he saw the prodigy Zhou Yu wiping out the enemies at the Cliff of Fire, he saw Caesar crossing the Rubicon saying “alea iacta est”, he saw the people fighting for every inch of land at Stalingrad, and he saw that great man leading his country to greatness and announced, “the People have stood up”. Then, he saw himself, the wrinkles started to fade, his hair blacken, and his heart pumping for rebirth, he saw the light, glowing at the end of the alley, and at every corner he planted his faith, projecting the people he used to lead, and himself he used to believe in.  
In one transient instant of life, he saw “the end”, and he could not control himself from slowly stepping toward that darkness, and diving into the river of the forgotten, flowing towards nihility. Jiang was trembling, but yet resisting, and slowly he felt that he was not to be defeated, and he shall not. He started to fight with his spirit, striving to turn back, and tearing his heart into two. The wind was howling with the storms rumbling, and the entire world covered in chaos and darkness. Amongst which was a young soul, nearly annihilated, fighting a corrupted body of staleness and mediocrity. The older, powerful but faithless and corrupted, confronted by the weak yet resolute and unwavering younger, interrogating him of the dreams and motivations that he used to have. The older was wavering, as the younger started to push him slowly away from the edge of nothingness, and begging for mediocrity to come for the sake of escapism, and all of a sudden, it fell peace.  
Jiang was still sitting on his armchair, holding a cup of tea while stroking across the wrinkles that started to appear on his head, and staring into the street, but now he saw none, he felt it. The wrinkles were still there, and the hair still grey and the catamaran was still swiftly drifting along the idyllic river of the south, but something felt different. The mediocrity that someone used to beg vanished into the thin air, and the man sitting on the armchair would never be the same. “Elder,” he voiced to himself, “yet younger,” stood up, and headed for something that he has long abandoned—hope.  
He started desperately picking up the things he had left behind before—the books, the industries, the governance, and, most importantly, the faith. Pulling up his trousers, cleaning up the messes in his decayed bedroom, and polishing his aged black glasses, the wrinkles on his head no longer seemed to be the burden, and his hair the encumbrance. Jiang is changing, naivety washed out, with the experiences of the elder, and the endless faith of the younger.  
The destined day of Hradec Králové eventually came. Jiang as usual sitting on his armchair, drinking his tea and reading the books—has been the fourth he had read this day. A man stepped slowly into his room, the sound of his footsteps, not heavy, yet also steady, seemed like that of a man who is of Jiang’s match. The man has that scent of experience and sedation, something Jiang had never gone into contact with.  
Jiang slowly turned around, and the person in front of him evoked the gush of surprise of even the staidest person ever—it was Deng. Deng was the leader of the nation, well celebrated, and endorsed by people as the “chief designer” of the young republic. Albeit surprised, Jiang is not to create any gaffe and undue awe. He remained peaceful and showed Deng the respect which he deserved.  
The two wise elders, under the unique foggy days of the South of the River, commenced the converse that changed Jiang’s life.  
“Violence and betrayal broke out in the capital, I am too old, and we now need a leader,” said Deng with perturbation being projected on his face. The man in front of Jiang, who has been through hundreds of moments of life and death, was now unnerved by the riot. That was something Jiang could not have foreseen even though with his worldly and prodigious mind.  
“And…” ensued Deng after taking a deep breath, “we want that to be you.”  
In that freezing moment, the entirety of his past life came up to Jiang’s mind, the days of fervency and impulsion, and the days of inaction and depression, and the days of sprinting forward with sedation no matter how the world is going to tell his story in the river of the Eld—“the die is cast.” Before Jiang could raise his eyebrow and illustrate the tiniest flicker of query and suspicion, Deng said to him with expectation:  
“The Centre has decided, you will be the general secretary.”  
Though with decades of sedimentation of knowledge and experience, Jiang still could not place himself into the scenario that is taking place. Probably out of humility, or out of the eerie feeling of himself being flattered, uttered Jiang, “I’m not being modest, but you better find someone else.”  
Deng sat still, not showing the slightest of wavering.  
The Elder stared into the north, where the Republic is at its never-seen-before crisis, and he looked back at the books he’d read, and his wife, who has been the one standing behind Jiang for all of the years, he felt the responsibility and duty calling. All of that sudden, he felt what he felt 50 years ago, when the nation is on the brink of extinction, when the country is on the edge of destruction—he stood up to his service. 50 years later, the Republic called again for another Beowulf to be that saviour, Jiang would not throw away his shot.  
He stood up, his footsteps determined, and his eye spirited, said to Deng, “One should uphold his country’s interest with his life, he should not do things just to pursue his personal gains and he should not evade responsibilities for fear of personal loss.”—What the great Lin Zexu had said to his loved ones before he set out the journey without turning back.  
The trains, crossing the countryside of the land of dragons and Confucius, and the people, roaring with fury for the sake of national revival, Jiang was determined. He felt that what he is going to face, is no catamaran floating on the river, it is the Victory leading the entire fleet with the destiny of the nation into the enemy line at Trafalgar, and he is Horatio Nelson—He is either to die on the battlefield or to write down in capital “TRIUMPH” in the river of the Eld, but he is never to retreat from the hideous tide.  
Arriving at the north, stepping out of the train, and going into the centre of the storm, whereof what’s past is prologue.  
What welcomed Jiang in the capital was the roaring wind and the freezing temperature, so cold as if any drop of water would instantly condense into ice—something Jiang hadn’t felt for long. He no longer had the flowing rivers surrounding him, instead, he now resided in the so-called “Sea”.  
Say that the capital was the centre of the nation, then the Sea would be the centre of the capital. The Sea is the gigantic residence to the most colossal figures in the nation, known for an enormous lake in it. For Jiang, this was something different, and somehow eerie. The man is of south-born, all the things he was confronted by are small and subtle—the catamaran on the rivers, the whispers of the birds on the grey rooftops of the black and white lodges just by the water, and those the most amiable of people. Now, he had to face the enormous Sea, the magnificent building complexes, and those the cunningest and most schematic of people.  
Albeit the disparities, Jiang was to settle down and adapt, and within months he established both his authority and friendships by his unique personality of charisma and sedation and blew the whistle for his ten-year tenure as the general secretary.  
There were thousands of documents and endless works he had to go through, undertake and oversee every day of these ten years, though old, Jiang was never depleted with his motivation deriving from the origin, which had been unwavering for the past 60 years. Some titled him as the greatest debater amongst all, defeating all those pessimists and critics who sought for even the tiniest flicker of evidence to prove that Jiang was “merely a puppet” and “so incompetent as an antiquity”.  
Entering the world stage, local dissents were not the only people who want to destroy Jiang, the foreign foes or foreign-manipulated factions were scheming the long-waited rearmament against the captain who is riding the ship of the Republic out of the storm of chaos and corruption—amongst whom the most menacing was the media.  
Many years later another elder in charge of another regime across the ocean remarked, “media are damn bad”, and recurrently referring to the so-called “official spokesperson of the free world” as “fake news” regardless of the apparent grammatical error that could easily be picked on by the finical media.  
In the new century, and the new millennial, the world once again dressed itself under the pseudomorph of peacefulness and harmony, while the true stage was full of turbulence and incitement.  
Seven years had passed since Jiang was swiftly and safely guiding the path for the Republic. Unlike the rising popularity of the contemporary term of “anxiety of seven years” that had been constantly used by the new-generation netizens to refer to some mythical marriage-related emotional status, Jiang was not disturbed by the lengthy tenure of his. He, as usual, was full of passion in his work and was entirely devoted to conceiving the blueprint of the nation in the new millennial—the same passion that erupted when he met his rival, the media, or more specifically, the HK reporter.  
The day was as usual in the Sea, the ministers and Jiang were receiving the media in the hall. Among them, one figure was someone towards whom Jiang could not inhibit his suspicion—It was a female reporter from HK, a unique district under the GOSAR (Government of the Special Administration District) in the Republic. She was not old, but looked aggressive and bold—Jiang could tell that from her firm eyesight and motion that was looking desperately for the chance for a question, in fact, more of an audacious confrontation.  
“President Jiang, do you think it is good for Mr.Dong to snatch his second tenure? Is the capital standing behind him?” coming from the crowd was this abrupt female voice. Jiang soon realised it was the reporter from HK, and he was getting ready for a brutal clash of eloquence and rhetorics.  
“Of course↗️” answered Jiang in his deliberately exaggerated tone.  
“There was a recent report from the West, judging that the capitol would take various approaches to interfere with HK’s legal system, and arbitrarily appoint the minister of the GOSAR.”  
Here, Jiang had realised what he was up against—presetting the negative image of the capitol, resorting to the West—he was put into a difficult situation to respond. He is neither to confirm the allegation of “appointing the minister” nor to reject that and yield in this confrontation.  
Being aware that he had no chance to beat the reporter on the basis established by the reporter, with audacity but also prudence, Jiang aimed for destroying the basis of the battle. The hall was thronged by media from the entire world, and Jiang knew well that this is an invisible battle that he could not afford to lose. Once decided to openly rebuke a media, he would be portrayed as the Big Brother suppressing the so-called “individual freedom”, and the only way he is going to prevail is by thoroughly uproot the reporter’s standpoint of malice.  
Jiang didn’t hesitate, as the situation wouldn’t allow him to do that, and stepped close to his foe.  
He commenced with a Chinese idiom, “when there are winds, it doesn’t mean that winds ensue—that’s one thing you have to learn and comprehend.” The reporter backed off a little bit, probably not understanding the idiom due to her lacking understanding of mandarin—although, ironically, she is questioning the president in Chinese.  
“We don’t have the slightest thought of appointing the minister of the GOSAR,” Jiang’s eloquence marched on steadily, “in fact, when you asked me that question just now, I could have answered ‘there’s for me to say’. But I have to keep you happy, so you tell me what should I do?”  
The reporter remained silent, or, she was not able to utter anything. If Jiang stopped here, he would have been recognised as the suppressor of the “free media”, and also a “grumpy old man”. Yet, Jiang’s charisma and impulse of wise rose up, just as how unique a person he is—he carried on, ferociously.  
Rising discontent and fury were coming out from the elder’s mouth—“You HK reporters are very familiar with the theories of the West and very good at resorting to Western authority,” utilising his converse-high-ground, Jiang continued on his discourse on the West, “but you are still TOO YOUNG, I’ve overcome hundreds of challenge, I’ve seen too much…Is there any western country I haven’t visited? That prodigy reporter from America, I conversed so pleasantly with that gentlemen , he’s far above you.”  
Probably shocked by Jiang directly roasting on the West—the exclusive taboo for the president of the Republic, the reporter still could not refute and looked desperate and helpless, that aggression and boldness of her vanished into thin air in the Sea.  
“You HK reporters are always excited even when the tiniest things happened, yet, the ideas coming from you, are still TOO SIMPLE, sometimes NAIVE.” Jiang didn’t inhibit his long-suppressed discontent towards his rival, still going on like a ruthless warrior slaying his running enemies, “I’m sorry, I’m talking to you as an ELDER, I think it is necessary to give some ‘life experiences’.”  
Jiang again resorted to the Chinese idioms, “There's a Chinese slang called 'silence makes big fortune', it is the wisest choice not to respond under situations like this. But having you so fervent, I ought to keep you happy, oughtn't I?” Jiang was unveiling and wiping out the conundrum all the Republic’s leaders had been facing for decades, and soon the world would no longer view him as a cowardly head of the state.  
“You really want to ask me if I support the minister, I say yes. He is currently the very minister himself, and how come we not support him?” Jiang ended his speech with a mysterious smile, and all the media in the hall, though some of whom hostile to the Republic, were now looking to Jiang with respect and admiration—“He is nothing of mediocrity.”  
Abrupt as always, the reporter chose to fight back at this moment, “What if…what if in the next election…” Her voice was trembling like a rat horrified by a ferocious predator.  
And like a predator, before the naive reporter could finish her word, Jiang ruthlessly fought back, “Then it HAS to follow the basic laws of HK, doesn't it? Simple logic, right? Don’t try to make some big news, and simply criticise me for that. When the time comes, the capitol will make its position.” Jiang ends his offensive with Chinese-accented English, and walked out of the hall with no hesitation, “You people…NAIVE, I'M ANGRY.”  
The past fifteen minutes were the climax of Jiang’s entire life, the logic, the sentiment, the satire, the audacity—these are something the world has never witnessed of him, and of the Republic’s leader. The news of Jiang’s chastise robbed all the huge news of their headlines on the newspaper, the world was either shocked or amazed by this elder with such young and endless passion. Yet, every time Jiang looked back at this moment, only he could think of, with a cup of newly-poured tea in his hand, was the swiftness and sedation of riding a catamaran over a river just as what he did when he was young in the town of water and georgic, without any surprise or thrill. The rise and fall, elation and poignance, satisfaction and discontent were not to affect Jiang, he wrote down with Chinese Calligraphy that night the poems of Su Shi, “Looking back at the glories and chagrins, there are no ups, and there are no downs.”

The remaining years flew by as river flows, looking back to those ten years, they meant to the Elder like a page flipped over of a book full of sedimentation.  
The flood of 1998 devastated the south of the growing Republic. Jiang didn’t back down, he was the one to stand up to the damn, giving that famous address, “Us, Chinese People shall not be defeated.”  
The visit of 1999 was the first interaction between the Republic and the West after that notorious riot and the subsequent crackdown. In the foreign lands and all by himself confronting waves of dissent-confrontations, he was the one who changed the image of the Republic, making it better than ever.  
Ten years passed, and he had to step down. The past ten years had been the period during which the Republic was accelerated in all of its aspects, benefiting its citizens and the globe. Reminiscences after decades still looked back with nostalgia, titling it the “golden age”. Amongst all of this, Jiang was the one who received the most—“The man who changed China”, “The best of his time” and “The role model”—yet he was also the one who rejected the most.  
“Just three little contributions,” said Jiang in his late eighties. There was no personality cult, nor was there any propaganda as he peacefully recalled his memories of the years of excitement and euphoria.  
The nation thrived, and the people prospered. Jiang was sitting there on his armchair, holding a cup of tea while stroking across the wrinkles that started to appear on his head, and staring into the streets where he used to run with endless faith and hope, and in his head, the movie of the years of his play, with melancholy, but more with satisfaction and happiness—He smiled, not mysteriously, but with the entirety of the happiness of his life. He closed his eyes, his wrinkles were there, his hair white, the glasses black and tidy as ever. All was sedate and tranquil, but the heart remained running with utmost passion forever and ever.


End file.
